Gardening

Michelle Obama’s ‘American Grown,’ and More

No gardener worth her salt has time for lengthy books these days. It’s already “War and Peace” out there in the vegetable patch, what with the unhealthy trend of swift but pummeling rainfall and the climate’s hot flashes, not to mention the cutworm munching through the cabbage. Bounty and brevity will be our guides, I promise, but it may be hard: there’s so much coming up. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many books devoted to the importance of tomatoes and onions.

This country is rooted in a rich tradition of vegetable love, starting in the highest office. Thomas Jefferson, who credited his vegetable-based diet for his good health, gardened at the White House, as did John Adams. Eleanor Roosevelt even had her scrap of a garden patch. And several new books this season remind us of these historic links.

In her charming and thought-provoking AMERICAN GROWN: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America (Crown, $30), Michelle Obama describes her plan to use the White House garden as a way to call the nation’s attention to a big issue: the connection between the quality of our food and the health of our children. “American Grown” is a warm and personable record of her very public garden’s changing seasons. And tucked behind the hazy glow of its lovely photographs is an impassioned message: Vegetable gardens may be good for our diets, but they’re even more important for our hearts and souls.

Like every gardener, Obama worries about heat and heavy rains and poor soil. Luckily, she has the National Park Service staff at her back. Her garden in the heart of the nation’s capital inspired Obama to learn more about — and then to celebrate — urban gardens across the country; some of their stories have become part of hers. Schoolchildren, White House staffers, chefs and even Army officers began to share in the care of the garden. It became a hive of activity — with bee hives, too.

The book’s most stunning revelation comes from Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling during Obama’s visit to Fort Jackson, the largest Army basic training center in the country, who tells the first lady that 41 percent of the 129,000 civilians applying to join his branch of the military are overweight or obese, their bones brittle from lack of calcium and their teeth rotting. The Army can get its recruits in shape during basic training, but what, Hertling asks, about their families? And what about the next generation? Obama’s garden provides an answer.

Digging deep into our long, illustrious tradition of presidential dirt, a new book by Peter J. Hatch, “A RICH SPOT OF EARTH”: Thomas Jefferson’s Revolutionary Garden at Monticello (Yale University, $35), lovingly describes the 1,000-foot terraced vegetable garden that was restored to its 1812 ­appearance under the author’s able direction. Jefferson loved his house and garden, which included two acres for kitchen vegetables and four or five devoted to orchards. “But tho’ an old man, I am but a young gardener,” he wrote to the portrait painter Charles Willson Peale. “I find myself infinitely happier in my new mode of life,” he observed in 1809 about his recent escape from Washington.

Jefferson loved food and wine. His sociable personality and gracious generosity as a host meant that his neighbors were inspired to return the favor, filling his garden with plants from their own beds. It’s fascinating to learn that when there was a shortfall Jefferson’s household often bought vegetables from his slaves’ personal gardens: a purchase of 100 cabbages from Critta Hemings was recorded in the logbook in 1825. Jefferson’s garden was considered revolutionary because many of the vegetables he grew were uncommon in America at that time: tomatoes, brussels sprouts, okra, eggplant, peppers and peanuts among them. Jefferson once bragged that he had “rarely ever planted a flower in my life.”

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Illustration by Olimpia Zagnoli

Lovers of historical gardens will also appreciate VEGETABLE GARDENING THE COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG WAY: 18th-Century Methods for Today’s Organic Gardeners (Rodale, $30), by the estimable Wesley Greene. Though they might not want to dress up in breeches like the Williamsburg staff, today’s organic gardeners will discover much to admire in Barbara Temple Lombardi’s photographs of wooden dibbles, bell glasses, paper frames stretched over thinly planed cypress boards, even the dovetail joints on the cold frames. And the seeds! Greene’s book celebrates 50 vegetables, many of them colonial varieties.

The first American garden book was written in the 1760s in Virginia. Today, the historic restoration’s watering cans are still made by the gunsmiths, and its aphids are still controlled with a lime slurry. “Growing Sticks,” a chapter on pollarding, is particularly insightful, reminding us that “there are few items more useful to a gardener than a long, slender, supple stick.”

Peas are twining their way up the most unlikely sticks and fences these days. Sarah C. Rich’s handsome, intelligent URBAN FARMS (Abrams, $30) chronicles a movement to bring kale to the people, an effort that stretches across the country, from Brooklyn to Oakland. It’s a measure of how far behind we have left our rural roots that something considered as banal as a vegetable patch a mere 60 years ago is newsworthy today. Then again, we didn’t have nature deficit disorder in the old days; it was probably more like nature surfeit anxiety.

Today, it’s a shock — but a nice one — to find yourself face to face with the chicken, goat or donkey that lives down the block. A perceptive essay by one of Rich’s contributors, Alissa Walker, called “Little Homestead in the City,” captures the spirit of this new enterprise. “So if life in the city is better with a backyard beer factory, a basement incubating mushrooms, a few chickens, and maybe a goat, then the question remains: Why not just move to the country?” Her subjects answer by saying that they enjoy the best of both worlds — high-tech jobs by day, homesteading on weekends — as well as a chance to be part of a tight-knit community that wants to learn about gardening and enjoy good food.

For some, it’s all about living off the land, even if that land is fenced in by row houses. Rich and her photographer, Matthew Benson, visit Mary Seton Corboy, who started a program called Greensgrow in Philadelphia more than a decade ago. The business now includes an apiary, a year-round nursery and a stand that sells jams, vegetable spreads, sauces and seasonal pies. Corboy is a no-nonsense businesswoman. “More work, less talk,” as she says, could be what separates the farmer from the gardener.

Benson’s spirited photographs capture the joy and beauty of urban farming’s bounty. No vase full of lush peonies from the grounds of an elegant estate could inspire such looks of eager joy as do the tomatoes harvested out of New York City’s Edible Schoolyard. These vegetable gardeners — and farmers — are working against such odds that there’s simply no excuse to let a comparatively lush suburban backyard lie fallow.

But for those of you who do your harvesting at the farmers’ market, there are other ways to deepen your relationship to collards and cucumbers. VEGETABLES: A Biography (University of Chicago, $20), by Evelyne Bloch-Dano (translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan), delivers satisfaction in fabulous fashion. The history of vegetables does seem to be, in Bloch-Dano’s words, “sometimes as eventful as that of humans.” And it’s always good to know what you eat. Parsnips were fed to cows — and to wet nurses — in the belief that they increased milk production. Another nice detail: artichokes were Freud’s favorite plant. (Why am I not surprised?) Only the French would think to wonder “what distinguishes a donkey from a man?” The answer is cardoons. Read the book to find out why.

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Bounty from ReVision Urban Farm in Boston, which began at a shelter.Credit
Matthew Benson

Jefferson himself admitted to learning a great deal about gardens from the time spent in his library. “In agriculture,” he wrote, “I am only an amateur, having only that knolege which may be got from books, in the field I am entirely ignorant, & am now too old to learn.” In case you aren’t feeling too old to start your own patch of legumes, consider the American Horticultural Society’s HOMEGROWN HARVEST: A Season-by-Season Guide to a Sustainable Kitchen Garden (Mitchell Beazley, paper, $19.99), which manages the neat trick of being both handsome and handy — qualities as useful in a book as in a fellow gardener. The instructions are so simple and clear, as are the planting suggestions, that anyone will feel confident enough to till the soil. This is also one of the few garden books around that aren’t afraid to show some dirt in their illustrations. Why this trend in squeaky-clean garden pictures?

Equally delicious, and deliciously dirt-filled, is THE BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO GROWING HEIRLOOM VEGETABLES: The 100 Easiest-to-Grow, Tastiest Vegetables for Your Garden (Timber Press, paper, $19.95), by Marie Iannotti. There’s no strict definition for what constitutes an heirloom vegetable, but most sources agree that open pollination among plants of the same variety is critical (as opposed to modern hybrids bred for industrial farming) and so is age — most heirloom varieties are more than 50 years old. Iannotti credits her father, a lifelong gardener, with passing along “an obsessive compulsion for heirloom vegetables.” She has a welcoming, breezy style and is refreshingly honest about the veggies that have let her down — “Strawberry” popcorn, “Moon and Stars” watermelon. “Every novice heirloom gardener should grow all kinds of beans,” she advises. This is a book for those who get no kick from Champagne, unless it’s served with ramps.

Easily the most artfully beautiful vegetable book I’ve ever seen, HEIRLOOM FRUITS AND VEGETABLES (Thames & Hudson, $50),comes from the photographer Clay Perry, who was so dismayed by a report that the European Union had lost a vast percentage of its traditional varieties that he decided to enlist his artistic talents in the service of activism. Inspired by the Spanish still-life painters of the 16th and 17th centuries, he began taking pictures of endangered vegetables. His photographs are masterly romances, accompanied by an intelligent text by Toby Musgrave. This book offers convincing proof that we have an important heritage right at the tips of our tongues.

I prefer growing herbs. Not that I have anything to cook with them, mind you, but I do get the satisfaction of surrounding myself with plants that are so carefree some might describe them as weeds. HERBS: The Complete Gardener’s Guide (Firefly, paper, $24.95), by Patrick Lima, may make you think about turning your entire lawn over to herbs, particularly the gray-green artemisias. Angelica is recommended for digestive ailments, though in the 17th century people believed this six-foot beauty could ward off spirits and enchantments. A gardener could get lost for hours in Lima’s treasure trove of a book. If you can’t find heaven with Angelica archangelica, you’re under an evil spell.

If your garden fantasies involve chickens, Jessi Bloom, author of FREE-RANGE CHICKEN GARDENS: How to Create a Beautiful, Chicken-Friendly Yard (Timber Press, paper, $19.95), is here to make those dreams come true. Chickens bring out interesting characters. My new heroine is Elizabeth Zumwalt, a chicken whisperer, educator and entrepreneur who blogs about her family’s Bantam hens, sells eggs and gives half the proceeds to charity. She pulls a red wagon, topped with a chicken house, when she heads out to educate people about her birds. Elizabeth is 9 years old.

By the time you’re done with Bloom’s clever book, you’ll know almost as much about chickens as Elizabeth does. And maybe more about what chickens like than what your children do. You’ll be looking for bug logs and creating dust baths. You’ll know that chickens like to have mirrors hanging in their gardens — but take care with the angle, since they have eyes on the sides of their heads. There is no end to the vanity of a chicken.

“Experienced free-ranging chickens” — now that’s a real sign of the times; do chickens no longer have a tribal memory of roaming? — will know not to eat toxic berries, but Bloom is an expert guide for the untutored. Somehow, I’m sure that chickens prefer heirloom vegetables to any other variety. And while your flock may break free to cross the road, you’ll be relieved to learn that (unless they have an unfortunate encounter with a car) they’ll probably be no worse for the wear. Chickens don’t sweat.

Bloom genially celebrates geodesic domes and shingled coops with stone chimneys and even clean-lined modernist coops. She also writes about “naughty” chickens: “Chickens are social and hormonal creatures, and when we have them living in ways that are different from how they would live naturally, they are prone to behaviors that can be damaging to themselves or that are simply normal but just catch us off guard.” You might have thought she was talking about teenagers, but I now see that they’re easier to raise than chickens. I’m thinking . . . roast chicken with that rosemary?

Dominique Browning is the senior director of MomsCleanAirForce.org. She blogs at SlowLoveLife.com.

A version of this review appears in print on June 3, 2012, on page BR14 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Gardening. Today's Paper|Subscribe